Thailand 2018 Retreat Day 2: Why We Need to Stop Proving Ourselves

Day 2 of the retreat was really the official start day of teaching - the day started with me teaching tantra yoga, an amazing breakfast (including gluten free pancakes and homemade chocolate sauce).

Actually I can't talk about the food right now, cos I'm having a food crisis in Bali - I think the food is blah cos I keep comparing every meal to my fave spots in Chiang Mai. It's bad fam.

After breakfast we went on a vegan food tour of Chiang Mai where we learned about the history of the city through its food. We learned about Buddhism, monks, the monarchy etc.

And we ate and boy, did we eat - mainly organic vegetables, prepared in innovative ways.

Food is a thing for me (trust me, I eat constantly) - so everyone got to really eat on this retreat because I wanted to debunk the myth of vegan food being tasteless or limited or whatever.

When lunch time came, everyone was too full to have lunch because they'd been eating all day, so we skipped that meal and headed back to Mala Dhara.

But of course, we were way behind schedule so I improvised and started teaching in the songthaew (red truck/ Thai minibus).

When we got to the venue I gave everyone 5 mins to change and meet at the pool so we could continue our lesson.

So I started doing guided inner child and inner teen meditations by the pool and gave people time to journal.

And then we had dinner and continued our lessons upstairs on the terrace under the stars. It was a little magical, to be honest.

The focus for this day was about hard work and the ancestral connection we have to "hard work" as Black women and this need to prove that we are not lazy and are hardworking.

We can't just relax and be, we need to do and do and prove and prove and that holds us back financially.

We only have 24 hours in a day so expansion requires us to think differently.

Day 2 was about exploring where this need to prove ourselves came from and it was about allowing our ancestors to find peace and know they are enough. We are enough as we are.

I took everyone through a womb meditation to help them understand this.

I was then guided to do individual work with everyone. So everyone got their own guided mediation, that they were required to do every morning after yoga.

Some people got womb meditations, some got inner child and some ancestral. Depending on whatever came up in the session.

By the end of day 1 everyone was tired and some people were having physical reactions to the work as deep pain started being unearthed.

I was feeling happy...but that's because I didn't know what Jo and Lebo had in store in their lessons. So I was blissfully unaware of my own pain.